Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists and Start-Ups Are Going Vegan

Let the bubble begin! This weekend, the New York Times ran a story about how Silicon Valley venture capitalists are starting to pour big bucks into food start-ups ($350 million in the past year), drawn in by both the massive size of the market and the fact that the food industry is “terribly broken,” according to one foodtrepreneur. Some of the businesses are what you’d expect–digital stuff like online food retail and iPhone apps for ordering delivery–but most of them seem to be focused on one goal:
turning everyone vegan.

“Our mission is to revolutionize the food production industry by replacing meat and dairy with plant based alternatives”is written on walls of Lyrical Foods‘ headquarters in Menlo Park, CA, where the company makes cheese out of almond and macadamia milk. Hampton Creek Foods has come up with Beyond Eggs, a mix of of peas, sorghum, beans, and other plants that its creators claim has the same functionality and taste as real eggs. Beyond Meat and Sand Hill Foods are both veggie burger companies, and both have been funded by recent rounds of V.C. investment. According to its website, Beyond Meat is “focused on perfectly replacing animal protein with plant protein where doing so creates nutritional value at lower cost.” And then there’s the meat printer.

The New York Times, for reasons unknown, didn’t mention what might be the most radical food start-up backed by Silicon Valley: a company called Modern Meadow, which plans to use 3D printing technology and lab-grown muscle cells to manufacture slabs of meat. The idea is to use “bioink,” made up of those cells, and print the meat, layer by layer. The founder recently told reddit that his team has come up with a prototype that tastes something like beef, but that they might branch out to pork or tuna in the future. And Peter Thiel, one of the guys who started PayPal, recently sunk $350,000 into the company.

But while the subtext of “killing or exploiting animals is bad” runs through these companies’ mission statements, these start-ups aren’t in it for the PETA points. Instead, they’re using the language of green technology and bottom-line business sense to make the case for going vegan.

A screenshot from Beyond Eggs’ product overview page

The word “cruel” isn’t in these companies’ vocabulary (it isn’t mentioned once in any of their official literature). The animal lovers’ cri de coeur has been replaced by arguments for the cost-effectiveness and reduced environmental impact of using more plant-based food, and finding ways to “embed sustainable innovation into…supply chains.” If New York and California’s venture capitalists are the visionary investors they claim to be, the future they’ve seen looks a lot like Soylent Green. But if these companies figure out a way to make printed meat, bean-eggs, and nut-milk cheese, it’ll at least be a much better-tasting dystopia than Charlton Heston’s. (And we won’t be eating people! Just plants.)